Janina Seubert

Janina Seubert is a Principal Researcher (Senior Forskare) and Docent in Psychology at the Karolinska Institutet's Department of Clinical Neuroscience. She leads the Nutritional Neuroscience Lab, focusing on multisensory integration of smell, taste, and visual cues during food perception, and its neural basis for dietary behavior and health. Her work bridges cognitive neuroscience, sensory neuroscience, and nutritional science.

• 2006: Master of Science in Neuro-Cognitive Psychology, LMU Munich
• 2010: PhD in Clinical Neuroscience, RWTH Aachen University

Her research investigates how humans identify food flavors, assess their relevance, and form preferences, with a strong focus on metabolic regulation of olfactory and gustatory reward. She employs fMRI, structural imaging, and psychophysical methods to study health implications like appetite control, binge eating, and dementia risk. Her projects include Swedish Research Council grants (2018-2021, 2023-2026) and an ERC Starting Grant (2021-2026) for OLFLINK, which explores flavor preference formation and digestive tract feedback mechanisms.

Recent publications highlight flavor-specific neural coding in the insula, hunger-attention interactions in odor processing, and dissociation of liking-wanting in food reward, reflecting her emphasis on sensory-metabolic-behavioral interplay. Awards include the 2024 Association for Chemoreception Sciences Research Excellence Award and the 2010 Hans Heimann Prize for junior researchers.

• Swedish Research Council grants (2018-2021, 2023-2026)
• ERC Starting Grant (2021-2026) for OLFLINK
• Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft grant (2012-2014)

She supervises students including Lucile Rey (2024) and Putu Khorisantono (2021), coordinates courses at KI, and serves on grant panels for Wellcome Trust and ANR. As Chair of KI's Psychology Internationalization Committee and a Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences member, she advocates for academic internationalization and public science awareness through media engagements with Big Think, Horizon EU, SVT, and Senior University Stockholm lectures.